A significant reason behind many of the world’s problems involves misguided people with corrupted values and lack of empathy who actively seek to further divide and disempower humanity. Ultimately, these people become pawns in a larger game they don’t truly understand, but are given rewards to play these roles in society elevating their status above those of the “herd.” These leaders typically hold leadership roles in divisive groups that pit human against human, leading to greater conflict in the world and the continual erosion of the sovereingty of individualised eternal human consciousness. As human beings cut themselves off from the innate pure energy fundamental to an eternal human being, they transform from victims and begin to align with the forces who victimised them in the first place. Thus, the victim becomes the victimiser. The human victims become the pawns who take down the rest of humanity steering more and more people toward a fragmented future by recruiting them into the same distorted dehumanising mind control agenda.

When it comes to improving the world, it is up to the individual to make any positive change internally first. I call this process self-integration, whereby an individual reclaims the sovereignty of their own personal energy and consciousness, and actively seeks to align it with positive pure energy. Sadly, too few people take inner development seriously and would rather become slaves to external ideologies (fragmented consciousness collectives) that actively seek to disempower and dehumanise.

Dehumanisation is a form of abuse, setting up the victim-victimizer dynamic that splits humanity into segregated collectives, pitting each of them against each other, thereby weakening humanity as a whole. The social engineers who create this dynamic then step in to manipulate the weakened social dynamic imposing further steps toward fulfilling their agenda of human consciousness assimilation.

The process is famously known as the divide and conquer strategy, where abusers maintain their power and control by splitting the strength of their opponents, allowing them to redirect human frustration and anger away from the real perpetrators, but instead anger or frustration is redirected at other human groups who are positioned as the false enemies in the popular mind. Ultimately, it is our wilful ignorance contributing to the fracturing of humanity through war and abuse, all because so many people choose to look at superficial differences, rather than the commonalities all humans share. Until humanity can break free from this mind control spell, humanity might never see who the real enemies pulling the strings behind the scenes truly are.

The entity groups controlling humanity deploy sophisticated forms of social mind control to program the minds of individuals to participate in dehumanising strategies. This is why sociologists report how so many people are unable to move beyond their own self-interest when they join group collectives, ultimately dooming any altruistic motives from coming to the forefront.

Moralistic strife invariably weakens the strongest groups as individuals compete within the group for power and those who don’t seek power face conforming to those who do, who tend to rise to the top due to their greater social power. Matt Ridley—an expert on the evolution of social cooperation—believes we are built to be social, trustworthy, cooperative, but also selfish. ^{(Ridley, 1998)} Haidt sees our “hivishness” as something inevitably blinding us to other moral concerns, “Our bee-like nature facilitates altruism, heroism, war, and genocide.” ^{(Haidt, 2013)} Collectivism’s ultimate goal of altruistic cooperation often fails to extend beyond a group’s boundaries or seeks to flatten heirarchies entirely which has its own problems.

I agree this is the outcome of group politics, but I disagree that selfish is fundamental to the human condition at the core of self-identity. If we are able to transcend these petty differences, and link with a more pure energy, we can certainly rise above anything that is damaging such as greed and self-interest.

Thus, we end up in a world filled with competing collectives of people who engage in the constant warfare of social destroying identity politics that seeks to divide humans into differing groups based on many aspects such as nationhood, race, gender, political viewpoint and more. Often identity (group politics is promoted as a strive for equality, but ends up doing the opposite, even leading to disasterous consequences as revealed in totalitarian regimes as one superior group seeks to murder those who don’t conform to their will.

Psychologist Jordan Peterson explains how identity politics invariably leads to polarized groups of people. As people view the world through the lens that makes their collective identity paramount, it inevitably produces a reversion to divisive tribalism, and as history has painfully shown us, diverse tribes of people end up in war and conflict. He says, “If you play the game of your enemies, and you win, you win their game. You don't win... You just become the most sucessful exponent of their pathology,” he warns. “How is that a good thing? I think the whole group identity thing is seriously pathological.”

It is pathological because if you view your group identity as paramount, then this is one short step away from perceiving your group as superior to all other groups of people. If groups have different perspectives, then you are not doubt going to want your group to win, therefore life descends into competition and the whole divide and conquer scenerio begins to unfold. This then leads to people increasingly reverting to only associating with those people who share the same group identity, completely blinding them from any outside perspectives or views. This is referred to as in-group bias. The dogma of the group identity then becomes sacrosanct, and thus you become a slave to the ideology, assimilating your individual consciousness into the overall consciousness held by the group. As you lose your sense of self, you can quickly start acting on the will of the “group mind” and engage in acts you never would normally consider on your own. This is how the Nazi’s, how Stalin, how Mao were able to convince their followers (typical human beings like you and me) to engage in acts that ended up killing millions upon millions of people. History has repeatedly shown how dehumanising and victimising behaviours increase in correlation with extremist ideologies.

In The Psychology of the Crowds, French polymath and psychologist Gustave Le Bon discusses the behaviour of mobs during the French Revolution. He explained they functioned through a form of group mind suggestibility where normal civilised individuals became capable of contradicting their own moral beliefs within the safety of the mob, “Isolated, he may be a cultivated individual, in a crowd, he is a barbarian —that is, a creature acting by instinct.” ^{(Dutton, 2007 )}, ^{(Bon, 1896)} Anonymity within a group ultimately reduces personal responsibility creating the potential for impulsivity and feelings of invincibility. Why would the need for belonging be so strong that we would be willing to surrender our common sense and human decency?

Psychology professors Voronov and Singer believe we value either tolerance or conformance (loyalty) highly, but not both at the same time, emphasising the major social challenge with social conformance to group membership. ^{(Voronov & Singer, 2002)} Haidt saw this too; when people value conformance more, we become increasingly intolerant, a major social issue limiting human freedom and a primary instigator of aggression and violence. ^{(Haidt, 2013)}

One key feature of social influence is the idea of identification, where we base our own identity on someone we admire. The leader-follower synergy links us with others helping to relieve feelings of anxiety but conforms us to what Freud termed the primal horde, “a hypothetical group that slew its father figure and erected totems in his place.” ^{(Dutton, 2007 )} Many ideological groups become crippled by collective narcissism, following the example set by often their charismatic and powerful leaders, who are the people most capable within the group of leading those within in it, and convincing outsiders to join. The groups that rise to the top, invariably have leaders highly skilled in ways of talking to crowds that put people into a form of hypnotic trance allowing the group propaganda to embed deeply into one’s newly forming group identity.

Collective narcissism was a term developed by German sociologist Theodore Adorno describing the Nazis rise to power throughout the 1930s. The central feature of narcissism is emotional dependence on admiration and recognition by others. Narcissism becomes collective when an individual has an inflated glorification and self-love of their group and is most predominant in groups driven upon notions of religion, nationality or ethnicity etc...

Our desire to obtain positive self-esteem from groups is a driving force in developing in-group bias. Narcissist collectives form when we develop emotional dependence on a group and prejudice others selectively. We can feel a great sense of love and respect for our own people, but our narcissistic perspective can make our thinking irrational whereby we prejudice others selectively.

Attachment to a group identity can encourage the development of insensitive attitudes towards people who are different. Differences stand out to us more, and such prejudices are learned beliefs, driven and maintained by fear. Our narcissist perspective can also increase conviction our group somehow deserves special treatment. We may become hostile when our group is not adequately recognised or criticised because it threatens our grandiose image of it, and the core of one’s self-identity because we have incorrectly merged it with the group identity. Collective narcissism overlaps similarly with ethnocentrism but extends the definition beyond an ethnic or cultural level to any type of group.

Ethnocentrism is evaluating other cultures based on preconceptions originating from one’s own culture. Sociologist William Graham Sumner explains it occurs when one group or culture becomes the centre of everything, exalting its superiority beyond all others. He found it exists all over the world from modern nations to primitive tribes. Xenophobia defines the intolerance toward outsiders of a national, social, or cultural identity, formed by fear-based ethnic, religious, cultural, racist, or national prejudices. Fear is what drives “us-them” thinking into adulthood, restricting our feelings of empathy or care only toward those we identify with strongly.

Pyschology professor Donald Dutton believes the origin of “us-them” thinking stems from early attachment in infant-caregiver bonds:

By the age of six, children exhibit a strong preference for their own nationality—even before they fully understand what a nation is. Hence, ethnocentrism and xenophobia may be universals based on the attachment process itself, literally a dark side of attachment. ^{(Dutton, 2007 )}

I feel that socialization programming stands at the heart of this “darkness” in early age, and would not be inherent in a normal civilised human society built on proper self-integration. It is up to adults to lead the way, and our children can only react and immitate what they invariably see in their environment.

 Social psychologists suggest we tend to dismiss outsiders as individuals (called out-group homogeneity bias) enabling us to stereotype and even oppress an entire group. ^{(Smith, Less Than Human: Why We Demean, Enslave, and Exterminate Others, 2012)} Our ability to have empathy for another human being increases when we understand someone’s personal story, but without any personalised context, we lose the context of human nature and their similarity to us as a human being. Ultimately, it is the power of the group bias, that lowers the intrinsic worth of a human being because they are simply “different” to us. This difference is what the “group” programs into the minds of its followers.

Professor of Anthropology, Mark Nathan Cohen, believes cultural attitudes are what hinders social empathy on a larger scale because it constrains our ability to understand and appreciate the actions of outsiders, preventing us from seeing the consequences of our actions or realising any alternatives. ^{(Cohen, 1999)} Since sociobiologists view xenophobia as a universal phenomenon, it highlights a global systemic failure of all cultural paradigms to develop people maturely. ^{(Xenophobia, n.d.)}

Social psychologist Jonathan Haidt believes humankind has become stuck in an evolutionary prison of selfish and groupish behaviour, driving our obsession with righteousness, but leads inevitably to self-righteous moral superiority. This type of thinking can serve a crucial purpose in human evolution because the righteous mind makes it possible for us to interact in large cooperative groups, but righteousness guarantees moralistic strife will then curse our social groups. ^{(Haidt, 2013)} 

When our moral gauge erodes, we can forget we are a single species, and we begin to classify people based on the perceived worth derived from our socially conditioned filters. Any isolating group will invariably begin to evaluate people as having higher or lower intrinsic worth, inevitably constructing war, social hierarchies and class divides.

Our modern world still sub-consciously operates on primordial fears, where the use of violence defends our group identity from outsiders who are a possible threat to ouor safety. Dutton reveals how some sociologists believe the idea of peaceful humans is not evident in any society; what exists is only an enforced peace. ^{(Dutton, 2007 )} Constant war and slave-taking are a common thread throughout human culture, and even anthropological evidence suggests nonviolent tribes were exceptions due only to isolation, not choice. Tribal violence is motivated by selfishness, fear and greed; however, these are ways of perception that are pathological and not representative of a properly self-integrated human being.

Even when we might consider ourselves non-violent, peaceful and caring human beings, Dutton warns the majority of us “are capable of the most horrific violence against fellow humans when a ‘perfect storm’ of social conditions exists.” ^{(Dutton, 2007 )} Something happens in society which is capable of turning a healthy percentage of people into victimizers and we need to understand what it is to defend ourselves against it.

Social psychologist James Waller believes four traits act together to push ordinary people to commit violence against others:

1. Xenophobia and desire for social dominance;

2. Moral disengagement;

3. Socialization and a culture of cruelty, the merger of role and person;

4. Dehumanization, blaming of the victims and us-them thinking.  ^{(Dutton, 2007 )}

A fragmented sense of self-identity, socialisation and group identities are the large factors contributing to the first three traits, while dehumanisation is the sad outcome of a person choosing to act on those predispositions.

Philosophy professor David Livingstone Smith is a world-leading expert on dehumanisation defining it as a psychological process capable of disabling our moral inhibitions against engaging in acts we otherwise wouldn’t do. He believes there is scarce literature on dehumanisation and the study of it needs to become a priority if we are to prevent it, “If dehumanization really has the significance that scholars claim, then untangling its dynamics ought to be among our most pressing priorities, and its neglect is as perplexing as it is grave.” ^{(Smith, Less Than Human: Why We Demean, Enslave, and Exterminate Others, 2012)} He argues the lack of in-depth research prevents policies and interventions from addressing the causes. ^{(Smith, Less Than Human: Why We Demean, Enslave, and Exterminate Others, 2012)}

Smith wonders what enables us to conceive of others as less than human. He believes the architecture of our minds makes us vulnerable to persuasion because of our natural bias toward outsiders and desire to protect our social group. He believes dehumanisation to be entirely learned behaviour, “a cultural process, not a biological one,” but it “has to ride piggyback on biological adaptations in order to be effective.” ^{(Smith, Less Than Human: Why We Demean, Enslave, and Exterminate Others, 2012)} He wonders:

These inhibitions account for the powerful social bonds that unite human communities and explain the extraordinary success story of our species. But this generates a puzzle. From time immemorial men have banded together to kill and enslave their neighbors, rape their women, take over their hunting grounds, drink their water, or grow crops in their fertile soil. ^{(Smith, Less Than Human: Why We Demean, Enslave, and Exterminate Others, 2012)}

In every case of genocide Smith studied, the perpetrators believed the people they targeted were ethnoracially different from themselves. ^{(Smith, Less Than Human: Why We Demean, Enslave, and Exterminate Others, 2012)} Xenophobic instincts exist in all social mammals, which mute aggression to community members unless they violate group norms, but become hostile to any outsiders who might emerge as a threat to food, water, or breeding. Smith believes the biological explanation of xenophobia supplies the missing link in the story of dehumanisation. ^{(Smith, Less Than Human: Why We Demean, Enslave, and Exterminate Others, 2012)} It goes beyond the hatred and fear of strangers requiring sophisticated cognitive decisions beyond those capable of other mammals, “Dehumanization is bound up with the intricacies of symbolic culture, including notions of value, hierarchy, race, and the cosmic order. It is something that only a human brain could concoct.” ^{(Smith, Less Than Human: Why We Demean, Enslave, and Exterminate Others, 2012)}

A major psychological dynamic behind dehumanisation is believing life arranges as a “hierarchy of value” with God at the top and inert matter at the bottom. Our heirarchical socialisation processes program this concept of thinking during our early development. We then naturally tend to classify life in terms of intrinsic importance based on intelligence levels, such as relegating nonhuman animals to a lower position in this hierarchy. ^{(Dehumanization, Genocide, and the Psychology of Indifference, n.d.)}, ^{(Smith, Less Than Human: Why We Demean, Enslave, and Exterminate Others, 2012)}

Discrimination is often a thinking error classifying other people as having less intrinsic humanity, whereby someone appears as a human-looking creature but comprises a sub-human essence or no human essence at all. Smith believes this principle is crucial for understanding dehumanisation:

Scientifically speaking, this is nonsense. There's no such thing as a canine essence or a human essence. Nevertheless, the essentialist mindset is deeply entrenched in the human psyche, and powerfully influences the ways that we make sense of the world.^{(Dehumanization, Genocide, and the Psychology of Indifference, n.d.)}

Any biological and genetic differences between one human group and another are trivial at most.

Various studies report how rising power correlates with increases in dehumanisation. ^{(More power leads to more dehumanization, says CU-Boulder study, n.d.)} When elite aristocrats or oligarchs explicitly refer to subordinates and lowers classes as having less intrinsic value as themselves, it explains why they are so class-conscious and vehemently opposed to breeding with “commoners” or “peasants” in the lower classes. Smith explains,

Typically, the subhuman essence (as well as the human essence) is imagined to be carried in the blood. In this framework, it is vital to prevent human blood from being polluted by subhuman blood. German Nazis (as well as fifteenth-century Spaniards, North American racists, and others) were preoccupied with heredity and the purity of blood to the point of obsession. ^{(Smith, Less Than Human: Why We Demean, Enslave, and Exterminate Others, 2012)}

Throughout the history of world violence, Smith found repeated references to enemies as subhuman creatures, including ancient Chinese, Egyptian and Mesopotamian literature. In religion, many Christians believe the OT God’s actions were not necessarily atrocities because the people who died were not seen as innocent. Even the children and babies had to die because the belief was they would grow up to be wicked like their parents. Therefore they had a lower human essence due to their group membership.

When white Europeans colonised the west, they did so on the premise the lands were “uninhabited” despite existing indigenous populations living there. However, these people were deemed primitive and essentially subhuman beings. As historically quoted from one article, indigenous people were “lacking a mind in one of two ways: either lacking self-control and emotions, like an animal, or lacking reason and intellect, like a child.” ^{(The psychology of hate: How we deny human beings their humanity , n.d.)}

Lessening the intrinsic value of these human beings to primitive soulless animals justified the use of genocide to colonise the lands. Smith explains there is no better way to create enthusiasm for genocide than representing people as vermin or parasites needing extermination:

This is how European colonists conceived of Native Americans, and how slave owners conceived of their human chattel. This is how the Nazis conceived of Jews, and how Rwandan Hutus conceived of their Tutsi neighbors. This way of thinking is reflected in dehumanizing epithets-referring to whole populations as lice, flies, rats, bacilli, dogs, wolves, monsters, and so on. ^{(Dehumanization, Genocide, and the Psychology of Indifference, n.d.)}

Diminishing the supposed intelligence of people is a dehumanising tactic, and central to the elitist beliefs of upper classes, even in democratic nations today. Such thinking enabled slavery. Anglican clergyman and civil rights activist, Morgan Godwyn’s 17th-century description of dehumanisation of African slaves, made it clear colonists viewed them as subhuman creatures. Slave-owners told him Negros carried resemblances of manhood, but were not men, they were “creatures destitute of souls, to be ranked among brute beasts, and treated accordingly.” ^{(Smith, Dehumanization, essentialism, and moral psychology)} Some slave owners fed their slaves out of hog troughs to emphasise their sub-human animal nature both socially and metaphysically. Many protests about equal rights reiterated the need for the oppressed to be viewed as human beings. For example, “Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated in Memphis while supporting a labor strike by sanitation workers whose rallying cry was ‘I am a man.’” ^{(The psychology of hate: How we deny human beings their humanity , n.d.)}

In Nazi Germany, Himmler labelled Jews as beasts in human appearance. Goebbels’s propaganda depicted imagery of Jews as vermin, large masses of rats, or wriggling lice. ^{(Dutton, 2007 )} In this way, the “ethic cleansing” of Jews was likened to cleansing an infestation, infection or virus. We tend to think of all Nazi’s as monsters, but Smith warns, “What’s most disturbing about the Nazi phenomenon is not that the Nazis were madmen or monsters. It’s that they were ordinary human beings.” ^{(Smith, Less Than Human: Why We Demean, Enslave, and Exterminate Others, 2012)}

Nazi public culture was constructed and propagandised through a comprehensive system of meaning, transmitted through powerful symbolic rituals, and renewed in communal celebrations with the mantra, “Not every being with a human face is human.” ^{(Smith, Less Than Human: Why We Demean, Enslave, and Exterminate Others, 2012)} Ordinary people were conditioned to exclude Jews from the system of moral rights and obligations that normally bound humankind together. So, while it was wrong to kill a person, it was permissible to exterminate a cockroach or a rat. When the Nazis described Jews as Untermenschen (subhumans), they didn't mean it metaphorically, says Smith, “They didn't mean they were like subhumans. They meant they were literally subhuman.” ^{(Smith, Less Than Human: Why We Demean, Enslave, and Exterminate Others, 2012)} Throughout the testimony of major war criminals at Nuremberg, the common thread cited by Nazi defendants was how decades of anti-Semitic propaganda had shaped their worldview to see Jews in this way.

Smith argues there is one fundamental problem with conceiving people to see others as sub-human. Unless we are clinically psychopathic, we all have varying levels of natural psychological response to traits of humanness.

Dehumanisers want to believe their human targets are animals, but our intrinsic humanity rejects this notion if we allow ourselves such depth of feeling. The arising dissonance within can shift between perceiving someone as human and subhuman at the same time. Nazi Germany literature addressed this problem by depicting Jews in two different guises, either as a vile animal (the sub-human essence) or as human monsters (humans turned evil). Smith argues we should not make the same mistake and view dehumanisers as monsters because this merely “dehumanises the dehumanisers” making us think they were born that way, or that they are inherently different to us ordinary folk. The danger comes from thinking we would never be capable of doing similar things as these evil monsters. The sad reality is under the right set of conditions, most humans are capable of dehumanising behaviour through targetted psychological manipulation.

With effective implemention of propaganda, dehumanisation can permeate through social beliefs eventually embedding certain thoughts in a falsely engineered social identity. State-organised dehumanisation often targets perceived political, racial, ethnic, national, or religious minority groups, or making people fearful of outside nation-states. All forms of discrimination—whether it is against race, sexual minorities, ethnicity—are dehumanising to the people affected. ^{(Smith, Less Than Human: Why We Demean, Enslave, and Exterminate Others, 2012)} Smith believes once our moral reservations are removed regarding subsets of people, it begins the rapid descent toward killing, torturing, raping, and experimenting upon other human beings. ^{(Smith, Less Than Human: Why We Demean, Enslave, and Exterminate Others, 2012)}

Eliminating natural moral reservations is a key component of military training, a needed tactic to create effective killers. The last thing the military wants is a moral soldier who might question their orders to kill. Modern military training is a key example of a systematic process designed to create a dissociative split in the identity of its soldiers, cutting off crucial thought processes within the higher order brain functions that use more critical judgement, such as empathy, compassion and love. Epley explains, “Modern armies now know that they have to overcome these empathic urges, so soldiers undergo relentless training that desensitizes them to close combat, so that they can do their jobs.” ^{(The psychology of hate: How we deny human beings their humanity , n.d.)}  

Many soldiers lose their nerve when they realise their enemy is simply another human being they may have no direct grudge toward. Dutton explains:

War can’t occur unless the members of one group are prepared to go out and kill the members of another. This raises a problem. In the movies, killing is easy. Both heroes and villains nonchalantly blow their enemies away, unperturbed by hesitation or remorse. But in real life things are different. Unless one is a sociopath, a psychologically disturbed person devoid of empathy and moral feeling, there are strong inhibitions against killing others. ^{(Smith, Less Than Human: Why We Demean, Enslave, and Exterminate Others, 2012)}

Dutton believes our, revulsion is a good thing, an emotional remnant of conditioned revulsion at killing our own species. Sadly, we overcome it too easily. ^{(Dutton, 2007 )}

Professor of behavioural science Nicholas Epley uses the US Civil War as an example, “Battles raged on for hours because the men just couldn’t bring themselves to kill one another once they could see the whites of their enemy’s eyes.” ^{(The psychology of hate: How we deny human beings their humanity , n.d.)} Interviews with WWII soldiers found only 15-20% discharged their weapons at the enemy in close firefights. For those who did shoot, many of them found it hard to hit their human targets. ^{(The psychology of hate: How we deny human beings their humanity , n.d.)}

Most soldiers experience extreme psychological distress during wartime regardless of whether they participate in killing or not. ^{(Dutton, 2007 )} Eventually, most soldiers kill out of duty, not from passion. Motivation to kill is achieved by representing war as a feud, personalising it by indoctrinating fear into soldiers so they firmly believe their way of life is at threat by “evil enemies who want to kill their family.” Smith warns, “There’s no better way to promote a war than by portraying the enemy as a bloodthirsty beast that must be killed in self-defense.” ^{(Smith, Less Than Human: Why We Demean, Enslave, and Exterminate Others, 2012)}

In extreme violent situations, some soldiers can commit atrocities they would otherwise never consider, and a small number of them will truly enjoy it. Some turn into sadists, rapists, and torturers within the protection wartime can provide them. Unimaginable horrors are reported in genocide events that include the killing of children and sadistic torture involving disembowelling or dismemberment. This is what dehumanisation makes humans capable of doing. 

In WWII, Australian General Sir Thomas Blamey reportedly told troops to view the Japanese as vile animals, “Your enemy is a curious race—a cross between a human being and an ape.… You know that we have to exterminate these vermin if we and our families are to live.…” ^{(Smith, Less Than Human: Why We Demean, Enslave, and Exterminate Others, 2012)} Such thinking contributed to escalating acts of corpse mutilation. As hunters do with animals they kill, some soldiers took body parts as trophies:

Charles Lindbergh recorded in his wartime diary that U.S. servicemen carved penholders and paper knives out of the thigh bones of fallen Japanese soldiers, dug up their decaying corpses to extract gold teeth, and collected ears, noses, teeth, and even skulls as wartime mementos. ^{(Smith, Less Than Human: Why We Demean, Enslave, and Exterminate Others, 2012)}

The other way soldiers are conditioned to kill is through heavy conditioning of obedience to the authority of their superiors. It removes any responsibility to ask moral questions because it is assumed those with higher rank, intelligence, and authority already considered the hard questions of war.

As we know with the Iraq war in 2003, sometimes authority lies to us about the actual threat to suit other political agendas. Smith writes, “When persons in positions of authority endorse acts of violence, the perpetrator is less inclined to feel personally responsible, and therefore less guilty in performing them.” ^{(Smith, Less Than Human: Why We Demean, Enslave, and Exterminate Others, 2012)}

Firebombing and drone warfare are examples of the disengagement of subordinates from the reality of their victims. Failing to look victims in the eye significantly reduces empathy toward targeting civilians. Sadly, remote warfare leads to far more collateral damage. ^{(Dutton, 2007 )} Innocent deaths then increase radicalisation of people who might not have considered doing so. Retaliation and revenge “terrorist attacks” increase against civilian populations since the increasingly remote military opponents are out of reach.

Similar mental techniques used on soldiers are also used on the general population. Anyone who takes the step to murder someone else must first murder the morality within themselves. How do you trick a human to murder the humanity inside themselves and act immorally? The answer is through emotional manipulation, propaganda, and dehumanising tactics.

Slaughter in the service of political ideology is commonplace throughout history, and the common dominator is power. History is rather clear about the outcome of any form of authoritative or totalitarian rule whether it be in myth or reality. People of all groups end up becoming horrendously victimised, oppressed, and murdered by the most powerful one; eventually even earlier allies end up becoming assimilated as the oppressors systematically “eat their own” one by one, even picking the most inconsequential difference or crime as reasoning, until no one is left. Noam Chomsky warned: “People with power understand exactly one thing: violence.” ^{(Chomsky, 2003)}

Political scientist professor Rudolph Rummel—a world-leading researcher on mass murder—outlined how power is the fundamental basis underlining all genocidal murder, “I believe that war and democide can be understood within a common framework. It is part of a social process, a balancing of powers, where Power is supreme.” ^{(Democide in totalitarian states: mortacracies and megamurderers-- an annotated bibliography* , n.d.)} The more power a regime holds directly corresponds to its likelihood of involving itself in deadly foreign and domestic wars, and the higher probability it will commit murder. Once engaged in conflict, the “fog of war” has allowed regimes to eliminate any social groups it finds objectionable. ^{(The Holocaust, n.d.)}

Rummel coined the term democide to extend the concept of genocide—the killing of people due to their group membership (race, ethnicity, religion, language)—to include all forms of government murder include indirect death created by the deliberate spread of disease, poverty (e.g. food blockades) and other means. ^{(Definition of Democide, n.d.)}  Rummel argues, “If a government causes deaths through a reckless and depraved indifference to human life, the deaths were as though intended.” ^{(Democide in totalitarian states: mortacracies and megamurderers-- an annotated bibliography* , n.d.)} 

The twentieth century was the bloodiest in human history. Democide related deaths were six times more prevalent than deaths from wars, which should surprise many of us, as Rummel explains, “Democide was not an event or an episode, not a happening or incident, it was done in the ordinary course of events.” ^{(Democide since world war II, n.d.)} 

Absolute power undisputedly creates “mega-murderers” who account for 90% of all democide related events. Example states include totalitarian USSR, communist China, Nazi Germany, militarist Japan, Khmer Rouge Cambodia, communist Vietnam, and communist Yugoslavia. ^{(The Holocaust, n.d.)}  Hitler, Stalin, Mao, Pol Pot, are examples of front men who led extreme right and extreme left regimes to murder countless people. ^{(Individualism vs. Collectivism: Our Future, Our Choice, n.d.)}

Megamurderer tyrants don’t carry out atrocity on their own; it was carried out by their dutiful followers, who were not all psychopaths or even bad people. They were simply dutiful members of the group, and as the group became more powerful, they had no choice but to continue conforming, as the consequences of not doing so, increased. Rummell warns that when duty goes unchecked good people can be manipulated and coerced into performing terrible deeds they wouldn’t otherwise have considered, effectively becoming sacrificial lambs for a collective’s larger goals.

When duty is our principal motivation for morality, our morality is easily corruptible. For example, the Nazi and Soviet Communist regimes exploited their citizens’ desire for nationalist duty—dictating how the individual is of no importance compared with the nation’s goals. A form of extreme propaganda and mind control that left them enslaved and destroyed. ^{(Peikoff, 1983)}

Power can prey on people’s desperation and weakness in uncertain situations providing the leadership and group support that soothes people’s anxiety temporarily. Rummel believes power waits for opportunity when people are already in a weakened state to achieve murderous potential, “It simply waits for an excuse, an event of some sort, an assassination, a massacre in a neighboring country, an attempted coup, a famine, or a natural disaster that will justify beginning the murder en masse.” ^{(Democide in totalitarian states: mortacracies and megamurderers-- an annotated bibliography* , n.d.)}

Undiscerning duty to authority is the fundamental cause of violence according to many experts, including Jarret Wollstein, author of The Causes of Aggression. ^{(Jarret B. Wollstein)}  Wollstein argues seven factors lead people to accept violence as an effective means to achieving goals: neurosis, collectivism, government, envy, ignorance, desperation, and greed. ^{(Jarret B. Wollstein)}  He believes war is an inevitable consequence when a collective identity becomes diametrically opposed to all others. ^{(Jarret B. Wollstein)}

The extent of power-based psychopathy is evident when only looking at the past century. The horrors of the 20^th century are staggering. Rummell estimated at least 262 million killed following research of over 8,000 reports of government-caused deaths. Let that number sink in for a second. Statistics often fail to spark the appropriate emotions, as Stalin once callously reminded us, “A single death is a tragedy. A million deaths is a statistic.” ^{(The Psychology of Genocide, n.d.)} We might feel little emotional difference between hearing of 261 or 262 million deaths, but if we knew the story of each of those one million people, we would be shocked beyond imagination. Statistics get in the way of our emotions, but personalised stories do not.

Sometimes societal indifference to mass killings is not because we are insensitive to them, but it is our dissociation kicking in to protect ourselves from acknowledging what other human beings are capable of doing. We can feel powerless in the face of this, but it is still important to listen to the cries of the quarter of a billion people murdered last century and understand what turns people against one another. It is clear to me, dehumanisation caused from group identity and identity politics. It seems innocent at first, but a small snowball invariably becomes a roaring avalanche that decimates all in its path, once it starts rolling down the mountain.

The absolute peak of democide occurred during World War II. After the horrors of WWII in 1945, people demanded events like the Holocaust should “never happen again” but sadly, humanity is still repeating the same errors of the past. While the Holocaust is the well-known example—and disturbs many people deeply—it is not even close to claiming the most victims. Sadly, far greater atrocities in terms of numbers have happened since. Six million Jews were calculated as having been murdered in the Holocaust, but Rummel reports a further 76 million people were killed in cold blood by regimes from 1945-1987:

It is as though the total Philippine population of 79,000,000 were murdered; or that all the people living in the Czech Republic, Hungary, Belgium, Portugal, Sweden, Austria, Switzerland, Denmark, Finland, and Norway were wiped out together--not in some natural catastrophe that kills quickly, but for most of the victims a painful and slow death at the hands of a government. …To look at this toll another way, it is over five times the number of combat deaths for all the nations that fought in WWII alone. ^{(Democide since world war II, n.d.)}

Post-WWII democide peaked in the 1950’s when Communist regimes seized power across eastern Europe with the assistance of Soviet forces and eventually included 26 regimes in total including China, North Korea, North Vietnam, Cambodia, Cuba, Grenada, Nicaragua, Ethiopia and many more. Totalitarian communism—a political ideology of unrestrained and absolute power—accounted for 87% of the 76 million murdered, destroying any social group incompatible with its beliefs or goals. ^{(Democide since world war II, n.d.)} Rummel noted, “The more totalitarian and less democratic a regime the more democide, the more genocide, and the greater the annual rate of democide that it commits.” ^{(The Holocaust, n.d.)} Such atrocity is a primary reason for promoting democratic freedom, he argues. ^{(Rudolph Rummel Talks About the Miracle of Liberty and Peace, n.d.)}

According to Rummel, international complicity was an active decision by outside democratic countries to disregard the slaughter involving many of these 76 million deaths , “In nine genocides in the twentieth century, no outside party intervened until the violence had played itself out, if at all.” ^{(Dutton, 2007 )} These included the Cambodian, Serbian and Rwandan genocides. Sadly, world superpowers justified their inaction or slow response due to national self-interest. ^{(Dutton, 2007 )}

Democide of such magnitude has been declining, because almost all totalitarian communist regimes have failed. North Korea remains communist, and other countries like China and Cuba have moved to more authoritarian, less-totalitarian versions, but still allegedly target and oppress political opponents or critics. ^{(Democide in totalitarian states: mortacracies and megamurderers-- an annotated bibliography* , n.d.), (Democide since world war II, n.d.)}

The shift toward democracy has undoubtedly helped the world reduce direct mass-murder but the trend has been shifting toward more covert means and a great future disaster in the near-term is not unlikely.

Between 1816-1991 there were no wars between democracies, primarily because economic, social, and political bonds tie democracies together. In comparison, there were 155 wars between democracies and non-democracies, and 198 between two non-democratic countries. Rummel concludes, “The lesson from all this horror is clear, as recent democide further confirms: reduce government power, check and balance it, divide it among different regions and municipalities, constitutionally limit it, and make the people its only source and arbiter. That is, promote democratic freedom.” ^{(Democide since world war II, n.d.)}

This does not mean though democracies are without blood on their hands. Democracies still led to 13% of the 262 million murdered (approximately 34 million deaths). Western colonisation involved the widespread slaughter of indigenous populations, and most of us are aware of indiscriminate killing of civilians in bombing or drone strikes, and various other war atrocities. Democratic countries appear willing to indiscriminately kill if it involves spreading democracy and there is some evidence suggesting the spread of communism in Latin America was possibly manufactured by the CIA to topple socialist rather than communist regimes.

Regrettably, the imposition of a particular kind of democratic freedom in nondemocratic nations can hide atrocity from the public eye. As Rummel warns,

Moreover, the secret services of democracies may also carry on subversive activities in other states, support deadly coups, and actually encourage or support rebel or military forces that are involved in democidal activities. …Such killing has been carried out in secret, behind a deliberate cover of lies and deceit involving tight censorship and control of journalists. ^{(Democide in totalitarian states: mortacracies and megamurderers-- an annotated bibliography* , n.d.)}

In WWII, the allied nations sometimes engaged in the deliberate mass murder of civilians. The firebombing of Dresden—a German cultural landmark—was widely criticised for serving very little military purpose, other than to punish and demoralise the German people. Even Winston Churchill distanced himself from the actions publically, despite being ultimately responsible for what occurred as the wartime leader.

Undermining the morale of the enemy by targeting civilians can be a critical unspoken about war strategy. Japan faced the same strategy in WWII, but on a far wider scale. The firebombing campaign of most Japanese cities and the two atomic detonations catastrophically devastated Japanese morale—potentially saving lives by shortening the war—but did the horrific bombing justify the means?

What many people might not know that before the nuclear detonations some 60 Japanese cities were firebombed with napalm, a substance that sticks to the skin and burns causing a horrific death. Dr Gregory H. Stanton, a research professor in Genocide Studies, argues the firebombing of Dresden and nuclear destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki were war crimes and acts of genocide. ^{(How We Can Prevent Genocide: Building an International Campaign to End Genocide, n.d.)}  Dutton holds similar views,

I will not agree or disagree with the view that democide was one of the necessities of the war. The argument is irrelevant. To me, democide is wrong, whether it promoted the war or not. But for those who do justify this democide, I would like to see the moral argument made explicit. When is murdering en mass an unarmed population justified? This is an ethical question, not empirical/factual. …  Is genocide ever right? I answer no. Absolutely. ^{(Was World War II American Urban Bombing Democide?, n.d.)}

Genocide is often ignored or forgiven by the victors but obviously is not forgiven if the offender belongs to an army that loses the war. ^{(Dutton, 2007 )}

Democracy is proving to be a better model of society to minimise atrocity on a grand scale, but it does not mean the currently manipulated form of democracy existing today isn’t acting just like any other totalitarian regime under a different guise. There are many ways democracy seemingly continues the theme of democide throughout civilian populations, but instead of using outright open murder as totalitarian regimes did, democracies slowly kill people in more subtle indirect means such as weakened mental and physical health.

Democracy is only a label, it doesn’t stop the actions of individuals who may seek to dominate others. Ultimately, we each determine our own ethics and morality, not theories or ideologies alone. Many of us become very transfixed on specific labels, embedding ourselves within dualistic frameworks such as democracy vs communism, left-wing vs right-wing, or religion vs religion, or men vs women. We quickly lose our humanity when defending our attachment to any idealogy which breeds divisive subtexts. Democide has occurred in both democratic and communist nations, by either left-wing and right-wing aligned governments. All religions have some kind of democide related blood on their hands. We cannot argue and antagonise our way toward unity.

Ultimately, it is our integrity and strong foundation in ethics and morality that matters more, and it has to start with the individual choosing to improve one’s grounding in self-identity first and foremost.

Without using our proper discernment, we can easily become unwitting pawns to the interests of those holding power who may not care for human life to our standards. Equally, we may not think we are capable of being turned away from our goodness and natural state of empathy for all human life, but history reveals a painful reality where even highly intelligent people fall prey to these tactics. People in democracies undoubtedly consider themselves more civilized, but the reality is good people can easily be brainwashed into holding dehumanising or victimizing beliefs, and may even be pushed to kill from a sense of duty or just naivety. We can kill either due to anger or due to fear. It is important to remember anger comes from within us, but fear is imparted to us from the outside. Fear is the greatest threat we must look out for because fear is capable of dispelling our inner goodness paralysing self-productive behaviours. A quick look at our modern democracies shows this reality of keeping people absorbed in fear carries on. Where does this lead us?

Any victimizer is still a human being and viewing them as inhuman prevents us from exploring what leads otherwise ordinary people to change. ^{(Smith, Less Than Human: Why We Demean, Enslave, and Exterminate Others, 2012)} No victimizer is truly powerless to his or her actions unless clinically mentally disabled, which is actually a very small percentage of the world population. In one example, psychiatrist Marc Sageman interviewed 200 Jihadists and found no obvious mental health problems. ^{(Smith, Less Than Human: Why We Demean, Enslave, and Exterminate Others, 2012)} Sosis and Alcorta explain,

Many contemporary Western stereotypes cast religiously motivated terrorists as either desperate or deranged madmen. Substantial psychological research, however, indicates that suicide terrorists are neither psychopaths nor sociopaths. Terrorist expert Scott Atran reports that ‘study after study demonstrates that suicide terrorists and their supporters are not abjectly poor, illiterate, or socially estranged’ (2004: 75). Nor is there a distinctive suicide terrorist psychological profile or personality. ^{(Ritual, Religion, and Violence: An Evolutionary Perspective)}

Some sociologists believe terrorists are generally people who feel marginalised or alienated from society perceiving themselves as victims of an injustice they are setting out to correct. ^{(Ritual, Religion, and Violence: An Evolutionary Perspective)} Violence is often the last resort, or unfortunately, conditioned into the subsequent generation of children who grow up trying to right a wrong taught to them all their life. Membership in extremist groups is appealing, affording a sense of community, social support and order in a world they may only know as chaotic and violent. It provides a feeling of personal worth and meaning through their group identity, that potentially is unavailable in the present situation. It does not always make such people psychopaths, just misguided and manipulated. ^{(Ritual, Religion, and Violence: An Evolutionary Perspective)} The revenge mentality further increases the issue, making more people act on primal survival mode instincts.

Even psychiatrists don’t deem sociopaths to be intellectually disabled due to the preservation of their dorsolateral function, indicating a measure of choice in their pathology. ^{(McNamara, 2009)} I reject human beings are violent in our natural self-integrated state. Consequently, conditioning and propaganda are the major driving force behind dehumanisation and therefore, violence.

The reduction of empathy begins at the foundational core of the “common knowledge” permeating through society. As exemplified in totalitarian regimes, this knowledge may shape through propaganda and other forms of mental conditioning. The externalised attachment to the national or cultural identity works to overpower our sense of intrinsic morality. Dutton warns, “The drive to kill is fueled by a societal sense of power and destiny—a sense of entitlement called narcissism in an individual but nationalism in a country.” ^{(Dutton, 2007 )}

For example, national holidays and competition between nations (such as the Olympic games) drive sub-conscious mental programming into people to believe there is a separation between people across the Earth, that each country is different. If everyone considered each human being as a member of the same community, with shared values and solidarity there wouldn’t be the need for armies and would be no need for war. Instead, the war mentality is driven deep into the psyche as humanly possible through these needless divisions. Alternative health researcher Jason Christoff explains:

Each country isn't different because we're all ruled by the same tyrannical 1%, who have been playing this fake flags, fake countries, fake nationalism agenda on us since the dawn of time....so we fight each other and drive our human tribe deeper into chaos. It's from this chaos that we're easier to control, rule over, steal from, manipulate and tyrannically govern….In order for government to exist, as an entity that continually saves us, there needs to be a fake enemy over there somewhere to save us from. So why not divide the tribe into two different areas, call them two different names, draw some fake lines on a map, have each group start waiving different flags, celebrate each newly named area's birthday (this is really the date the slave camp was established as people have been living there for thousands of years) and have each group knock the crap out of each other courtesy of staged events.......in order to keep the general public in a brain fog regarding how they're being ruled, controlled and stolen from. ^{(Christoff, n.d.)}

Sadly, this is the reality of what history teaches us. The idea can be hard to accept, but when we remain in denial, this is simply the social programming kicking in to keep us locked into the prevailing worldview.

Dehumanisation is the symptom of human ignorance as we lose sight of our core values as a human being. I agree with David Livingstone Smith’s summation, “So, those who believe that doing violence to others is licensed by their race, religion, or nationality are simply failing to recognise a deep truth about what it is to be human.” ^{(Smith, Less Than Human: Why We Demean, Enslave, and Exterminate Others, 2012)}

Paul Slovic also believes when we understand ourselves, we can overcome our psychological deficiencies and be galvanised into necessary action stopping atrocities from occurring. ^{(Genocide: Is it that the more who die, the less we care? , n.d.)} Smith believes victimisers reduce their own human essence when intending to do the same to their victims, “Even though evil people resemble human beings, they have lost the inner spark that makes one human. Wicked people repudiate their human essence, and acquire the essence of a nonhuman animal.” ^{(Smith, Less Than Human: Why We Demean, Enslave, and Exterminate Others, 2012)}

The core principle is simple, the more we dissociate from the pure energy innate at the heart of humanity, then the less empathy and care we will have. There are many levels of abuse and victimisation, but they all share a common denominator when it comes to our thinking and self-integration. We become conditioned by outsiders to make us think beyond ourselves. As we become more integrated and attached to a group, we start to walk down the path of developing a fragmented sense of identity and identity confusion. This is so common in our society we have begun to normalise it and accept its predominance in many of our social interactions and beliefs. The solution is to walk away from the group hive mind’s. Reject the left and right in politics. Reject identity politics and see ourselves divided from others. Many people who denounce racism on a sound premise, fall into the trap of forming a new group that dehumanises other races, keeping the cycle of racism alive.

Dehumanizing others doesn’t raise us above other people as people with power want to believe, it simply reduces their own integrity. Innocent victims of any abuser’s actions have to choose in themselves whether to maintain their good nature in the face of victimization, or fall trap to playing the victim card themselves and then acting on a lesser energy from the pain caused to them. This only causes further pain and fragments society further. A victim’s subsequent choices determine whether the cycle of abuse continues and the choice must be to step back and not engage.

All forms of group identity and identity politics play into the game of dehumanisation other human beings. Human beings need to wake-up from this game of victim-victimizer, because we haven’t learnt the lessons from all the horror and evil of the last century. If we don’t wake up, we are doomed to repeat the same painful mistakes once again.

The social engineers who sustain this game to ensare human beings know this is how they steer the world in the direction that suits their overall goals. The only change humanity has is to step back and say loudly, “We aren’t playing this game anymore”, because it is a game unnatural to eternal human beings. It is a game we have been tricked into playing to create our own demise.

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